This paper explores to what extent secondary policy issues are infuenced by electoral incentives. We develop a two dimensional political agency model in which a politician decides on both a frontline policy issue and a secondary policy issue. The model predicts when the incumbent should...

Since objective news coverage is vital to democracy, captured media can seriously distort collective decisions. The current paper develops a voting model where citizens are uncertain about the welfare effects induced by alternative policy options and derive information about those effects from...

This paper examines the effects of political pressure groups (lobbies) on the emissions abatement decisions of countries and on the stability of international environmental agreements. We consider two types of lobbies, industry and environmentalists. We determine the influence of lobby-groups on...

We investigate situations in which players make costly contributions as group members in a group conflict, and at the same time engage in contest with fellow group members to appropriate the possible reward. We introduce within group power asymmetry and complementarity in members'efforts, and...

We analyze non-cooperative international climate policy in a setting of political competition by national interest groups. In the first stage, countries decide whether to set up an international emission permits market, which only forms if it is supported by all countries. In the second stage,...

We consider a (pure) public goods provision problem with voluntary participation in a quasi-linear economy. We propose a new hybrid solution concept, the free-riding-proof core (FRP-Core), which endogenously determines a contribution group, public goods provision level, and how to share the...

Driven by the desire to fulfill the Maastricht fiscal criteria and pressed by mounting debt burdens that have accumulated over the past 30 years, a majority of EU-15 countries attempted to reduce their budget deficits during the 1990s. Yet, these nations have exhibited remarkable differences in...

This paper endeavours to illuminate the political and institutional factors that can help explain differing degrees of fiscal retrenchment in European Union countries for the time period 1990-2001. Several variants of the partisan approach and the veto players framework are elucidated and...

This paper revisits the fiscal decentralization theorem, by relaxing the role of the assumption that governments are benevolent, while retaining the assumption of policy uniformity. If instead, decisions are made by direct majority voting, (i) centralization can welfare-dominate decentralization...